Celebrity endorsements can greatly increase consumers’ awareness of a product, capture their attention and make an advertisement more memorable. In South Korea I see an increasing number of product endorsements by celebrities including the recent tie-up of Nintendo DSi and Girls Generation.

SNSD which stands for 소녀시대, meaning Girls Generation in Korean, is a girl group consisting of nine members with very long legs (on TV at least) and almost perfectly synchronized dance moves.

With nine members you can almost be certain that at least their looks does appeal to a wide target audience. Although this celebrity endorsement formula doesn’t require a PhD in rocket science, Nintendo shows local market knowledge in Korea.
However, this time I will leave out the topic of piracy in Korea and how software sales helps sell hardware.

The Korean online community is questioning the new adverts by pointing out that they are not exciting and bringing up the question what the camera is really good for. After all mobile phones have cameras on board with cute editing functionalities for pictures. My phone for example has an eight megapixel camera and a larger screen than the DSi. I would have prefered Girls Generation playing some rock solid camera controled games on the DSi advert instead.

The leading Korean pop group Wonder Girls perform in their latest video “Now”.
Considering this is a short music video the opening scene has a product placement of PlayStation3 for the duration of about one minute.
In one of my recent posts you have seen “Girls Generation“, another Korean girl group, promoting the game Dungeon & Fighter.

As an alternative they could have used the Game Park Wiz. It was just launched last month and is a local games handheld :)

The Korean pop group “Girls’ Generation” has been signed up to promote “Dungeon & Fighter”‘, an online action game developed by Neople and published by Nexon, according to Yonhap News Agency.

I am wondering if “nine” group members generate enough distraction to actually forget about the game. However apparently this girls group is quite popular in Korea and will manage to reach a large target audience.